What is Voir Dire?

Icecream17- I agree. I think that a successful business owner that has a lot of employees would typically see the company’s point of view.

These people will tend to side with the company and will often have little sympathy for the person that was terminated especially if the employee was terminated for excessive absences from work.

This is something that a person with a strong work ethic will understand and will tend to look unfavorably upon the employee.

The prosecutor might want to have people that will most likely sympathize with the employee like a union worker, or a social worker that will tend to understand the employee’s point of view more.

Sometimes in a criminal defense voir dire an attorney will ask a question of a somewhat sensitive nature and have the pool raise a card with a number on it so that they can properly distinguish who answered the question.

Simply raising your hand makes it difficult to determine which person answered what question.

A sample voir dire question for a criminal case might include, "Has anyone in your family ever been arrested for a criminal offense?" This will help the voire dire move along and find out if there are any potential negative feelings towards law enforcement.

Subway11- I agree with you. I think that mastering voir dire and jury selection really depends on how comfortable you can make these potential jurors.

Most will be very guarded and uncomfortable and getting them to relax is important in order to gain insight as to their character and opinions.

The questionnaire is helpful because it could provide you with demographic information as well as answers to questions that will shed a little bit of light on the juror prejudices.

For example, in a wrongful termination case, the ideal juror for the defense or the company sued would be a high level executive and very accomplished individual.

BrickBack-I think that mastering voir dire and jury selection are important to winning cases. Many cases have been lost because the makeup of the jury was unbalanced.

One side may have made a miscalculation or an assumption of how a particular ethnic group believes that may not be the case. These are the voir dire challenges that every attorney has to face.

Sometimes they are wrong. For example, in the OJ Simpson case the makeup of the jury was 9 African Americans, 1 Hispanic and two Caucasians. Ten of the jurors were women and two were men.

The jurors were all Democrats, half had bad experiences with law enforcement and half felt that it was acceptable to strike a family member. Also, 90% of these jurors believed that OJ Simpson could not have been guilty because he was a famous athlete.

This was a severe miscalculation on the prosecutor’s part because they felt that a jury of predominately African American women would sympathize with the victim more because they shared the same gender, but the results were very wrong.

They actually sympathize with the defendant in this case and made a grave miscalculation that lost them the case because Simpson was acquitted.

This is still a case that many people will continue talk about for many years to come.

Anon29878-I am so sorry that you have had to go through that. It can be difficult to juggle clients and also comply with jury duty requirements.

Jury duty is a right that we as Americans participate in order to provide a peer evaluation of the case brought before us.

We all have a right to a jury trial if we are accused of a crime which is why this process is so important.

I know that the jury duty voir dire can be more organized, but if you ever get to serve on a jury, the experience is incredible.

I know that since you are an independent contractor you will have to juggle your schedule, but if you are selected they can not pick you again for a long time.

Voir Dire is really the opportunity that both the defense and prosecuting attorneys have to meet potential jurors. Often both sides of the case have a profile in mind of the perfect juror that will sympathize most with their side of the case.

Both sides also understand what type of juror would be detrimental to their case and try to get them eliminated as part of the jury pool as quickly as possible.

The attorneys in the case offer s voir dire questionnaire on paper before they begin their direct examination.

The reason for this is simple. The attorneys will only have about a half an hour to possibly one hour to complete the jury duty voir dire so the questionnaire helps both sides to narrow down their focus based on the answers to the responses.

Also, the questions tend to be more sensitive which will allow a more honest and candid response than if the question were read aloud.

Why is voir dire done in the context of a particular case? Shouldn't jury selection be done first, and a case assigned to a jury after impartiality is decided? How has the jury system developed to be such a burden on the citizen (juror)?

I am an independent contractor, and initially postponed jury duty because I was unable to organize my schedule in 4 weeks. We established this week for jury duty and I called in every night like a good citizen and on Thursday night I was told to report on Friday. On Friday I was told if selected I would need to be available at least one week. I doubt I would be selected, but I'm trying to perform my duty as a citizen in good faith. Now I've rescheduled jury duty again. I will have a day to show up and will clear my schedule for 1 week (actually I'll schedule night shifts).

The citizens asked to do jury duty are the only "volunteers" in this process and the system needs to be adjusted to not inconvenience the volunteers.